You get a link (or links) back to your site, which helps with off-page optimization. You can connect with a new audience, and attract new subscribers and/or social media connections. You can also have your work viewed by a different (and potentially larger) readership and engage with them over questions, concerns, and ideas.

A while ago, I mentioned that I had a guest post published on Angela Maier’s education blog. After staring my edtech blog, I did a quick search around for websites and blogs in the education niche that welcomed guest posts and I found hers. She’s got a pretty well established site and following, so I wasn’t sure what to expect… but I wrote up the guest post and fired off the proposal anyway.

And I’m glad I did. For one thing, she has a large readership (which my blog does not), so it was nice to see my article tweeted, liked, and LinkedIn. There were some comments, and these helped me think about the topic (creating a virtual classroom library) more. And, I’m pretty sure it provided some hefty link juice back to my edtech blog – Tech and Teaching.

How do I know? This past week, Google implemented some search algorithm updates as well as a refresh of page rank. This relatively new blog, with relatively few links, is now a Page Rank 3.

Wow! In the long term, that’s not all that impressive, but I’m happy and proud to say that this blog jumped to a PR3 with the first page rank update. I only started the blog back in November, so it’s just a few months old. And I know PageRank isn’t the be all end all of SEO these days, but it’s still nice to see that recognition there with a cold hard number.

Now if only I could channel some of that into more search engine traffic and building a larger following of my own…

As an aside: I read that many people saw a dramatic drop in the number of links reported in their Google Webmaster Tools after the last update. I’ll post more about this later in the week, but I noticed that my four of my older sites had a dramatic drop in reported links while my three newer sites didn’t seem to have any significant changes.